“No,” says Asia. “We’ll take it into the woods and dump it there.”
She doesn’t wait to hear him agree. She leaves the path immediately, stepping and sliding into a small ravine with a rattle of pebbles. She walks along the bottom, picking her way past stones, logs, protruding roots, twists of brambles. She steps in a shallow puddle and mud sticks to the bottom of her right shoe.
She needs both hands to scramble up from the ravine, so she sets the bag down, her skirts catching on one tree root, another tearing her sleeve and leaving a stinging red welt on her arm. John hands the bag up to her and follows more gracefully. When they are deep into the woods, far from the usual paths, they hide the body in some brush, and, carrying the empty bag, make their circuitous, surreptitious way home.
Asia’s having second thoughts. John’s first impulse was honest and forthright. She’s ashamed of having talked him out of it. She’s been rereading Thomas Hood’s poem “The Dream of Eugene Aram,” and she says to John that now, like Aram, they’ve done a murder and hidden the body. “I hope it’s not the gallows for us,” she says. She’s trying for a light touch, but guilt is pressing upon her. John is silent.
Once home, she goes to her room, shoves the bloody bag under her bed to be washed later. She scrapes the mud from her shoe, picks the leaves from her hair, covers her torn sleeve with a shawl the day is much too warm for. She cleans her face. When she goes downstairs, no one seems to notice anything amiss.
Mr. Woolsey arrives the next morning. John has already left for the fields. Mother opens the door while Mr. Woolsey is still on the porch steps, beating the dust from his hat against his leg. He’s a vigorous, prosperous man of middle age. “I expect to be recompensed for my turkey,” he says without preamble and without entering the house. He names a price, twice what the turkey was worth.
“What turkey?” Mother asks. Asia listens from a hidden place halfway down the stairs. She has no trouble hearing him—he’s speaking loudly and in anger. Rosalie comes down the stairs, thumping and creaking the wood. She pauses to give Asia a puzzled look, then continues towards the parlor.
“You ask your boy what turkey,” Mr. Woolsey says. “Your boy that the whole neighborhood thinks is possessed by the devil. You ask your rude, impertinent girl. They’ve poached my bird, the two of them. I expect if I look in your midden, I’ll find the bones.”
Asia feels the widening gap between the person she wants to be and the person she is. How could she have been so cruel to poor Henry Lee, accepting a ring, allowing him to wax on about a life together in an ivy-covered cottage she’d never meant to live in? He hates her now and rightfully so. She’s spread gossip about Kate O’Laughlen in retaliation for the stories Kate has spread about her. Although her outward behavior towards her mother has lately improved, that anger still lives in her heart, like the stone in a cherry. And now she’s a thief and a liar.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mother tells him.
“I’m talking about your low common children. I’m talking about theft.”
“Asia,” Mother calls. “Will you please come here?”
Asia misses a step on her way to the door and narrowly avoids a fall. The hidden scratch on her arm is hot and painful. She suspects that her face has gone white, and she worries that the wrong expression or a sudden tremble will give her away.
“Good morning, Mr. Woolsey,” she says, her voice false in her own ears. Mr. Woolsey’s thick shock of hair, freed from his hat, is sticking up from his forehead. He has narrow-set eyes. When he looks intently at her, she feels like a bug pinned to a screen. Somewhere far off, Asia hears the little Hall children playing blindman’s wand.
“I think your mother is an honest woman,” Woolsey says, “despite her criminal offspring. You tell her what happened to my turkey. I think she’ll want to make it right.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Asia says. She feels low and common. She feels criminal. She feels the tick of her guilty pulse in her temple. This is the worst thing I’ve ever done, she thinks.
But Guilt was my grim Chamberlain: That lighted me to bed,
And drew my midnight curtains round, With fingers bloody red!
She makes sure to catch John before he comes home. John is a natural confessor. He has to be stopped.
She meets him in the lane. His shoulders are slumped, his footsteps a trudge. But when she tells him what has happened, his reaction is not what she expects. “Life is so short,” he says. “Don’t let us be sad. It’s a beautiful, beautiful world.”
* * *
—
Mother, with a sharp eye at both of them, meets Woolsey’s price.
* * *
—
The next thing John shoots is Woolsey’s pig. He does this while seated in the window of his bedroom, his legs dangling, the sun high overhead. There is no attempted cover-up. “Your pig was trespassing,” he tells Mr. Woolsey. “You all seem to have a lot of trouble figuring out which land is yours and which is mine.”
A week later, from that same window, he shoots Stephen Hooper’s dog. Stephen Hooper is a free black man, the father of several half black children, all of whom live with their mother. His cabin is about half a mile off from the farm. John has no particular gripe against Hooper. He just likes shooting things.
Long gone the days when the farm was a sanctuary for all God’s creatures. No squirrel, no rabbit is safe here now. “Trespassing,” John says again when Hooper comes to ask about his dog.
And yet, John’s capable of great tenderness towards anything he can’t shoot—flowers, insects, butterflies. He rescues a katydid from Asia who’d planned to pin her under glass. “You’re so bloodthirsty,” he says. “I won’t have it. Katy shall go free and sing in the sycamores tonight.”
viii
The harvest is a poor one. As a precaution against this, Mother leased some of the fields to a neighbor, Mr. Hagan, but that also ends badly. Hagan, ambitious and industrious, spends enormous sums on fertilizers and sends Mother the bills. He works the men and the horses to the point of exhaustion. After several weeks of this, Mother can bear no more. She meets him in the field to insist that the working day not start before sunup nor end after sundown. He is driving everyone most cruelly, she says.